Sunday, May 26, 2013

More on England and absolute power over reality itself

Regarding this post on the anti-religious British government’s claim of power to change reality, namely regarding gay marriage and the nature of the church and the sacraments (gay marriage and women bishops, as if the English ‘Reformation’ wasn’t enough of a clue), Michael Ernst writes:

England’s Constitution is unwritten and is essentially this: the Crown, and Parliament acting with authority from the Crown, are sovereign. Thus, anything is possible.

Not Burkean and/or the mother of our old republic but absolute power. I never thought of it that way before, but I knew that the monarch still has nearly absolute power in theory. So Parliament, acting in the Crown’s name, does. Thanks.

That reminds me: George III is one of history’s figures most wronged by myth. The American colonists’ grievances were against Parliament acting in his name, not him. My jury’s out about the American Revolution. I love the old republic. The classical Protestants and ‘Enlightenment’ men of reason and science who founded it still had enough in common with the church, believing in reason as conforming yourself to objective reality rather than do anything you want rather than understand old rules, to make it work. (Modern liberals hold their truths to be self-evident too but can’t back that up historically, so they throw reason out the window.) But again, the problems weren’t the king’s fault, only some of the colonists were rebels, not even a majority, and after all, they all owed the king their allegiance, like a vow, literally so in the case of colonial government and militias. The church is apolitical (it’s all good, as long as Catholics are free); politics is about choosing between imperfect solutions. So, stay with a Christian old regime turned anti-Catholic (not as bad in the colonies) or go with the literally godless republican rebels? The Loyalists, American Tories, get an undeserved bad rap along with King George. Many Americans were good, loyal British subjects, even serving in the British Army. The revolution was a civil war. We aren’t taught that. We learn about Benedict Arnold but he was the exception; he had understandable personal grievances and the British didn’t even like him personally.

Anyway, you’d think that Canada, which, before it became Canada, defeated attempted rebel/American invasions (or rather the British defending it did), was suspicious of the godless radical rebels, and was partly founded by Loyalists, would be a model of Burkean conservatism, a Tory alternative-timeline America, while America’s completely socialist and anti-religious, but the reverse happened. America still has its Scots-Irish Southerners, devout Baptists, who aren’t with the liberal elite’s program and thus are maligned as dumb hicks and dangerous bigots*. Canada looks and sounds like us but is as socialist and anti-religious as the mother country. So who knows what might have been best for America?

Recently a British pol said something like, ‘We don’t do religion’. In his country’s context, anti-religious, rather than the secular politics I believe in (how a Protestant country can be a good host for Catholics: the old America, back when liberals believed in individual rights). I’d rather have a Putin, even a likely hypocrite like him (gangster state), making political points by being photographed at a real apostolic church (not the English fake).

*And in the ’50s America had a huge Catholic minority at the height of its cultural and political power before the council threw that clout away and the Sixties assimilated them into the American liberal Protestant majority (so you have pols like Kathleen Sebelius: not Bad Catholic sinners like President Kennedy, but actual turncoats: I will not serve). The anti-abortion movement’s only practicing Catholics, a small minority of Catholics now (thanks, Vatican II) and a smaller one of Americans. And now our hosts have less in common with us and are more hostile, even more than the Know-Nothings. (For about five minutes in the Sixties, white ethnic Catholics were lefty mascots as part of anything but the old America; after all, the lefties loved the Kennedys. Then the lefties hated us again after Roe v. Wade.)